History HappeningsA newsletter published by the Department of History

The University of Memphis

Vol. 4, no. 2 Winter 2007

UOM096-FY0708/01

Faculty Edition

History Happenings—�

Not Your Average JoeBy Edward Skeen, Professor Emeritus

Professor Joseph M. Hawes is retiring in December after thirty-eight years of teach-ing and twenty-three and a half years at the University of Memphis. Joe grew up in west Texas surrounded by reminders of early Texas history in Fort Davis, Texas. He earned his A.B. degree at Rice University in 1960, his M.A. at Oklahoma State Uni-versity in 1962, and his Ph.D. at the University of Texas in 1969, writing his disser-tation, “Society vs. Its Children: Juvenile Delinquency In 19th Century America,” under the direction of Professor William H. Goetzmann.

Joe began his teaching career in 1969 at Indiana University Southeast for two years and moved on to Kansas State University between 1971 and 1984, serving as Chair of the History Department from 1973 to 1984. He came to the then Memphis State University in 1984 as Chair and served in that position until 1988.

Joe has specialized in social history, particularly the history of childhood and the family. A pioneer in the history of child-hood, he was the founder and first president of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, serving from 2002 to 2005. The society will produce a journal, due out in December, and Joe has a co-authored an article (with N. Ray Hiner) for the first issue. Joe has shared his unique knowledge in a variety of courses he has taught in our department. Further, many graduate students will attest to the value of his Seminar for Teaching Assistants.

Joe has also published widely in his field. He has written three books: The Children’s Rights Movement: A History of Advocacy and Protection (Twayne, 1991), Children Between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920-1940 (with N. Ray Hiner, Twayne, 1997), and Family and Society in American History (with Elizabeth Nybakken, University of Illinois, 2001). He has also co-edited Growing up in America: Children in Historical Perspective (with N. Ray Hiner, University of Illinois Press, 1985), American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (with N. Ray Hiner, Greenwood Press, 1985), American Fami-lies (with Elizabeth I. Nybakken, Greenwood Press, 1991), Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective (with N. Ray Hiner, Greenwood Press, 1995), and The Family in America: An Encyclopedia (with Elizabeth F. Shore, ABC-Clio, 2001). Joe’s contributions have been recognized. He was chosen as a Distinguished Faculty Member by the University College in 1997. He was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Lectureship at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies at Guangzhou, China, in spring 2000.

Joe has always taken on many committee responsibilities in our department. He has willingly served on many time-consum-ing departmental assignments, particularly search committees. Throughout his many years in our department he has always worked to make it better. He has been an outspoken and effective advocate for our program across the campus. He served on the Faculty Senate and helped to revise and restructure the Senate constitution. He also co-chaired a campus-wide com-mittee to revise and clarify the tenure and promotion guidelines.

When asked about memories of his time here at the University, he recalled that the basement of Mitchell Hall has been flooded more than twenty times. Although he is retiring, and he and his wife Gail are already planning for a visit to Australia in February, Joe will still maintain an office in the department and participate in the post-retirement teaching program. The department will still be able to profit from his expertise for a few more years.

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James Blythe finished his new book, The Life and Thought of Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemy of Lucca), 1236–1327, and expects to sign a contract soon to have it appear in two volumes. This past spring he chaired a session at the 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, organized by his doctoral student Whitney Huey, entitled “Broaden-ing the Cloister: Reconstructing Monastic Dialogue about the Feminine.” He delivered a paper on “Tolomeo Fiadoni’s View of Women.” On campus, he gave a talk to Phi Alpha Theta entitled “Christians, ‘Heretics,’ and Utopian Counterculturists in the Middle Ages.” Next spring, he will speak on “J.G.A. Pocock’s Thesis on Metahistorical Views of Empire: Another Dubious Medieval/Modern Turning Point” at the New College Conference on Me-dieval and Renaissance Studies, where he will also participate in presenting a Festschrift to his former teacher John Najemy. At the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies he will speak on “Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemy of Lucca) and the Controversy over the Reception of Aristotle’s Politics.” He continues to be Graduate Coordinator in the History Department, and this year he is teaching a course in Medieval and Renaissance History and a required

Ph.D. course in Global History. In addition to his academic interests, Dr. Blythe is an active photographer specializing in abstract images. He participated in several shows and had one photo accepted for the juried show at the RiverArts Festival. You can see some of his pictures at http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=4319473&a=32024908&f.

Beverly Bond spent much of summer 2007 traveling—first to a family wedding on the is-land of Culebra in Puerto Rico, then on a relaxing Alaskan cruise, followed by three weeks in Ghana with Dennis Laumann and six University of Memphis students. The day after her plane landed from Accra, Ghana, she was on her way to Nashville for another family reunion, and the next weekend she was in Orlando, Florida, for the Phi Kappa Phi Conven-tion. Dr. Bond is currently serving as president of the campus chapter of this international honor society. The final stop on the summer travel schedule was Knoxville for a board meet-ing of Humanities Tennessee, where she was elected vice-president of the Board of Direc-tors. Dr. Bond completed another essay on the National Association of Colored Women for the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and put the finishing touches on Tennessee Women: Their Histories, Their Stories, a manuscript she is editing with Dr. Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman (Arkansas State University) for University of Georgia Press.

Peter Brand traveled to Greece and Egypt in March to participate in two cable TV documentaries on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and another on the “Lost Pyramid” of the obscure 4th-Dynasty pharaoh Djedefre, a little-known king who ruled briefly between his father Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza and Khafre, Djedefre’s half-brother who built the middle pyramid at Giza, and the Great Sphinx. Djedefre’s ruined pyramid at Abu Rowash, on the northwestern outskirts of Cairo, is just a couple of miles north of Giza. During the trip, Dr. Brand also visited Alexandria, site of the ancient lighthouse, the Greek islands of Rhodes, the site of ancient Hali-carnassus on the western coast of Turkey and the hometown of the Father of History himself, Herodotus. Other sites on his itinerary included Athens and Olympia, site of the Olympic Games and of the great temple of Zeus. Back at home, Dr. Brand’s year

focused on Egyptological research, including the completion of two articles on monumental war scenes and palimpsest inscriptions from the time of Ramesses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty (ca. 1279-1200 BCE). Dr. Brand is also editing a volume of essays on Egyptian history in memory of the late Dr. William J. Murnane (1945-2000). Several of these essays by Dr. Murnane’s American and international colleagues have now been posted on a website: http://history.memphis.edu/murnane.

Faculty Happenings

History Happenings—�

Walter (Bob) Brown continues in his capacity as Assistant Chair, Coordinator of Under-graduate Studies, and one of the two advisers of undergraduate history majors, in addition to teaching courses in early modern European history. He directed a couple of honors theses, served on a variety of department committees, and conducted individual readings courses for a number of students in the undergraduate honors program and graduate program. Research interest in the development and context of English and continental European decorative arts 1500-1800 led to stays in England in the summer and at Christmas when, in addition to enjoying concerts, museum exhibitions, and the company of interesting friends, he worked in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum and studied objects in public and private col-lections. As Adjunct Curator of Decorative Arts at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, he serves on the Collection Management Committee and the Board of the Decorative Arts Trust, and he recently supervised the acquisition of several objects for the permanent collection. In the spring he presented a public lecture at the museum on the cultural context of silver design and production in early 18th-century England.

Charles Crawford continues oral history research as Project Director for the Veterans’ Oral History Project, which documents Mid-South participation in the Second World War. This program is currently supported by a generous grant from the Assisi Foundation, a local non-profit organization. Dr. Crawford also serves as the principal investigator and editor in the project, “L.D. Beard and the History of the Medical Implant Revolution,” which is supported by a grant through The University of Memphis Research Foundation. Crawford also provides historical commentary and consultation to local and national media, most recently to WKNO-TV, for the special production, “The War: A Mid-South Perspective,” and to National Public Radio, for a program distributed through 150 stations. He has written entries for the Encyclo-pedia of Arkansas History and Culture and provided editorial consultation and wrote the fore-word for the current book by Governor Winfield Dunn, From a Standing Start: My Tennessee Political Odyssey. On campus, he serves as a member of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Great Conversations programs, as a planning committee member of the University Libraries’ Annual

Symposium on the Mississippi Delta, and as an executive committee member of the Friends of the University Libraries. By appointment of the Shelby County Mayor, he serves a member of the Mississippi River Natural and Recreational Corridor Task Force and the Shelby County Historical Commission. His participation in the University’s graduate program contin-ues as well, with current service as dissertation director of fourteen doctoral students and as a committee member of others in the Department of History and other academic departments. With the graduation of Paul W. White (Ph.D. 2007), Dr. Crawford has successfully completed the direction of twenty-three doctoral dissertations.

Maurice Crouse continues to serve as Webmaster for the Web pages of the Department of History and as the technical producer for the departmental newsletter. He also serves on the Faculty Senate’s committee on information technology. The university recently recognized him for his 45th year of service.

Douglas Cupples remains an active participant in community history projects. He serves on the editorial board for the West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, as the recording secretary for the Shelby County Historical Commission, and as the Chair for the Markers Committee. His article on the history of professional art education in Memphis and the Mid-South is currently under review by Tennessee Historical Quarterly. He presented a paper on the Memphis author Shelby Foote at the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expres-sion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Upon the retirement of Dr. Frankle, he assumed the role of Coordinator for Adjunct Instruction. In May, Dr. Cupples traveled to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute., where he conducted research on the famous Vinson-Owens, a family of world-class figure skaters from Winchester, Mas-sachusetts.

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Guiomar Dueñas-Vargas delivered “Family Life, Politics and the Colombian Liberal Con-vention of 1863: Agripina Samper and Manuel Ancizar, a Liberal Couple” at the international colloquium “Conflict and Post-Conflict in Latin America, 200 years on, 25 years on” at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. She also presented the paper “Josefa Faces Patriarchal Justice: Rape/Incest in Late Colonial New Granada,” at the Rocky Moun-tain Council for Latin American Studies, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She spent the summer months (2007) doing research on women during the nineteenth century in Colombia at the National Archives at Bogotá, and she wrote the article, “Educating the Elites: Nineteenth Century Colombia.” Dr. Dueñas-Vargas also participated in the selection of candidates for the open Russian/Soviet position at the Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in New Orleans,. She is currently working on a paper that deals with census data on plebian women in Santafé, Colombia, to be delivered at a Latin American Conference this coming January.

Eda Fain has begun her second year in the History Department as a full-time instructor, having previously taught United States History and Tennessee History for seven years as a departmental adjunct. She served as a textbook reviewer for Houghton Mifflin’s revision of its two-volume U. S. History reader, Portrait of America. Dr. Fain also tabulated and analyzed results from student satisfaction surveys conducted during the departmental self-study. She has recently taught honors sections of American History surveys, a directed readings course for undergraduates, and an undergraduate/graduate special topics course in U. S. Material Culture. She designed discussion and written activities in conjunction with course readings and is offering the History of American Childhood this spring. Dr. Fain also presented a “Stand and Deliver” session to the Seminar for Teaching Assistants and participated in an

Emory & Henry College, Department of Geography, Southern Home Garden and Food survey. In well-known Memphis director Gene Crain’s final production, she reprised her role in Phillip Grace’s Heartstrings at Theatreworks. Fain is consult-ing with a Florida genealogist regarding co-authorship of a volume on history and genealogy in Tipton County, Tennessee. Her research interests include the nineteenth-century Memphis Mardi Gras, Shelby County ghost lore, American repre-sentations of the Christmas Fairy, and local celebrations of traditional holidays during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Aram Goudsouzian published “Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution” in American Studies and “‘The House That Russell Built’: Bill Russell, the University of San Francisco, and the Win-ning Streak That Changed College Basketball” in California History. He reviewed books for the Boston Globe and American Studies, presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, participated in panels for the university’s Graduate Student Conference in African American History, and was interviewed for the BBC radio special Poitier at 80. He also led a discussion on Martin Luther King for the Scholars in Critical Race Studies, joined “The Big Read” panel at Rhodes College on To Kill a Mockingbird, spoke about slave life to a fifth-grade class at St. George’s Independent School, and gave the keynote address at the 2007 Martin Luther King Day celebration at Kaskaskia College. The Purdue University College of Liberal Arts Alumni Association made him an inaugural winner

of the Emerging Voice Award, given to a scholar of distinction under the age of forty.

Jonathan Judaken returned to Memphis after spending the 2006-2007 academic year as a scholar-in-residence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has now as-sumed the position as Director of the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities. His first book, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intel-lectual (Nebraska, 2006) has received strong praise. In the Times Literary Supplement, Ronald Aronson wrote that “Judaken’s is a well developed and impressively knowledgeable study . . . presented in painstaking detail by someone who knows French history, and Sartre, very thor-oughly.” In the American Historical Review, Sam Moyn wrote, “No one interested in Sartre

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and his times will want to avoid grappling with Judaken’s learned and subtle commentaries.” In addition to several articles, he will have two edited volumes appear in 2008, Race After Sartre (SUNY Press, “Philosophy and Race” series) and Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge). Both books examine the nefarious and intertwined history of racism and antisemitism, as well as strategies and theories for opposing them. In addition, his interview “Black Intellectuals in America: A Conver-sation with Cornel West” appeared in Hedgehog Review. Dr. Judaken will give invited lectures this year at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, Arizona State University, City College of New York, University of Virginia, and University of Florida.

Dennis Laumann received the Thomas W. Briggs Foundation Excellence in Teaching Award at the university’s 2007 Faculty Convocation. This award recognizes outstanding undergrad-uate teaching and an overall commitment to undergraduate education. Dr. Laumann was elected the Chair of the Ghana Studies Council, an international organization of scholars which, among other activities, produces the academic journal Ghana Studies, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He joined the editorial advisory board of Ufahamu, the jour-nal of the UCLA African Activist Association. In March, Dr. Laumann was invited to the University of Alabama-Birmingham to take part in a panel discussion of the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution, pub-lished by Pathfinder Press. As part of the event, he delivered a lecture on Cuban participation in the liberation of southern Africa. At the annual meeting of the African Studies Associa-tion in New York this October, he chaired a panel entitled “Imagining the Nation, Imagining the World: A Panel to Honor the 50th Anniversary of Ghanaian Independence.” Over the summer, Dr. Laumann led the sixth annual Ghana Study Abroad Program, a three-week, interdisciplinary course offered through the university’s African and African American Studies Program. He continues to serve as Faculty Advisor to the university’s African Student As-sociation, the Marxist Student Union, and the Vegetarian Students of America.

Scott Marler joined the History Department as an assistant professor this fall, which rep-resented the culmination of an eventful and productive year for him. A former editor at the Journal of Southern History, Marler successfully defended his Rice University dissertation about the merchant community of nineteenth-century New Orleans in December 2006. Last summer, his dissertation won the M.E. Bradford Prize of the St. George Tucker Society, and it was also selected as one of three national finalists for the Allan Nevins Prize of the Economic History Association. Meanwhile, his thesis managed to negotiate the imposing gauntlet of editors, readers, and syndics at Cambridge University Press, and the week before the fall semester began, he received a contract from them to publish a revised version of his

work in 2009. He recently returned from presenting a portion of his work to the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Richmond, Virginia, and an article excerpted from two other chapters will be published by Civil War History next year. A longtime specialist in U.S., southern, and economic history, Dr. Marler was hired to teach the expansive new field of Atlantic World studies at the U of M, and thus far he is greatly enjoying the challenge of applying his specialized knowledge within its macrohistorical framework. A native of New Orleans who endured exile on the Texas Gulf Coast for many years, Dr. Marler has been unsurprised to find that life in Memphis suits him extremely well, and he and his wife Candice, along with their motley crew of six cats and an English bull terrier named Emily, are settling in quite nicely to their Midtown home.

Suzanne Onstine spent four months in Luxor, Egypt, last summer, establishing a new epi-graphic project in the 19th dynasty tomb of the priest Pa-nehsy and his wife, the chantress Ta-renut (Theban Tomb 16). This beautifully painted tomb should provide Dr. Onstine and the department’s graduate students with several years worth of fieldwork, doing drawings and researching the tomb owners and their place in history. While in Egypt, she also filmed a segment for a Discovery Channel program entitled Egypt’s 10 Greatest Discoveries. Her seg-ment will highlight the city of Deir el-Medina, commonly known as the workmen’s village, and its role in helping us understand the lives of ordinary ancient Egyptians. The air date is to be announced later.

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Catherine Phipps has been teaching and developing her courses in World History, East Asian History, and Historical Geography. In conjunction with the University of Mississippi, she was awarded a Northeast Asia Council Distinguished Speaker on Korea grant to bring Dr. Donald Clark to campus this term to speak about conditions in North Korea. On a more administrative level, she has also been working with the new Asian Studies and International Trade program, the Confucius Institute, and the Japan Outreach Coordinator to raise the profile of Asian Studies on campus. This summer she spent time at Duke University’s East Asian Library on a Duke University Asian/Pacific Studies Institute travel grant to conduct research for her manuscript. She is also working on an article provisionally titled “Kawada

Seizo on the Front Lines: A Japanese Reporter’s Account of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95,” a version of which she will present in the spring for the Phi Alpha Theta lecture series.

Kent Schull joined the faculty this fall as an Assistant Professor in Middle East history. He specializes in the 19th-20th century Middle East, particularly the late Ottoman Empire and Israel/Palestine. His research interests include crime, punishment, and prisons, issues of na-tion-state construction and nationalism, modernity, and childhood in the modern Middle East. He completed his doctorate in history from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) during the summer of 2007. His dissertation is entitled “Penal Institutions, Nation-state Construction, and Modernity in the Late Ottoman Empire (1908-1919).” This fall Dr. Schull presented a paper at the Middle East Studies Association’s annual meeting entitled “Children in Ottoman Prisons: Redefining Childhood during the Second Constitutional Pe-riod, 1908-1918.” Dr. Schull is teaching The Development of World Civilization II, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the History of the Modern Middle East. He is also work-ing to establish a study abroad program in Turkey for the summer of 2009. Dr. Schull is currently writing a book review for H-Levant on Rudolf Peter’s Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law and finishing an article entitled “Conceptualizing the Nation by Categorizing the Incarcerated: An investigation of how the Committee of Union and Progress viewed difference and its implications for Ottoman nation-state construction.” He is also anticipating the publication of his article entitled “Counting the Incarcerated: Young Turk Attempts to Systematically Collect Prison Statistics and their Effects on Prison Reform, 1908-1918” in Urban Violence and Public Order in the Ottoman Empire (XVIII-XX Centuries) this winter.

Janann Sherman is on a professional development assignment this fall to work on her next manuscript, a biography of aviation pioneer Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie, under contract with the University Press of Mississippi. Her recently completed article on Omlie will soon be pub-lished as part of an anthology on Tennessee Women, edited by Dr. Beverly Bond. Omlie was also the topic of Dr. Sherman’s presentation to the Conference of Historic Aviation Writers in October. Also in October, Sherman presented a series of workshops for Southwest Missouri area teachers on American women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras. She returns to the department in January, continues her service as chair, and will teach a special topics course in the spring: Gender and Sexuality as Issues in American Politics.

Arwin Smallwood took six graduate students to North Caro-lina this summer in the pilot phase of a research project enti-tled “Indian Woods: At the Crossroads of Three Cultures.” The

broad purpose of this project is to explore and document the 400-year history of the Indian Woods community and the creolization of its peoples. The scope of the project envisages the excavation of several sites within Eastern North Carolina, the collection of artifacts and docu-ments donated by residents of the community, and the preservation and mapping of the rich and immense history of the region. Smallwood also presented his research at several confer-ences nationally and internationally, including one entitled “New World Cartographies: Map-ping America, 1500-1776,” sponsored jointly by the American Museum in Britain, located in Bath, England, and the Rothemere American Institute of the University of Oxford, at Oxford, England. The conference was held in Claverton Manor, Bath, England, and featured scholars from several institutions from a range of countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, and

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Switzerland. Dr. Smallwood delivered a presentation entitled, “Mapping Red, White, and Black in America: Documenting through Maps the Merging of Native America, African and English Cultures, 1584-1776.”

Stephen Stein published his first book, From Torpedoes to Aviation: Washington Irving Cham-bers and Technological Innovation in the New Navy, in May with the University of Alabama Press. He presented a paper on Chambers and the first years of naval aviation at the Confer-ence of Historical Aviation Writers. His article “The Greely Relief Expedition and the New Navy” in the International Journal of Naval History won the Rear Admiral Ernest M. Eller Prize, a prestigious national award for the best article on naval history published each year. Ad-ditionally, he authored several entries for encyclopedias during the past year, including “French Ensor Chadwick,” “William Eaton Chandler,” “Gunboat Operations, Philippines,” “John Da-vis Long,” and “Bradley Allen Fiske” in the Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars (Denver: ABC-CLIO, forthcoming) and a 5000-word analysis of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points in Milestone Documents in American History (Schlager Group, forthcoming).

He continues to teach both in the classroom and online, and his new online course on the history of technology launched this fall. He will offer a new course on war in the ancient world for spring 2008.

Daniel Unowsky served as acting department chair while Dr. Janann Sherman was on leave during the fall 2007 semester. Berghahn Books published Dr. Unowsky’s most recent book, The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. The volume, co-edited with Laurence Cole of East Anglia University, includes contributions from scholars working in Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Israel, and the United States. In October, Dr. Unowsky presented a paper on Habsburg dynastic loyalty during World War I at a conference on Comparing Empires held at the Albert-Ludwig Uni-versity in Freiburg, Germany. He continues to work on a study of the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in what is today southern Poland.

Elton Weaver accepted a one-year teaching appointment in the Department of History after defending his dissertation last spring. The appointment has given him classroom experience and allowed him to cultivate his teaching skills. In October the Southern Regional Education Board awarded Dr. Weaver a doctoral award for completing his Ph.D. in history during the Compact for Faculty Diversity’s 14th Annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, held in Washington, D.C. Dr. Weaver is working on a full-length biography of Bishop C.H. Mason, founder of the 100-year-old Memphis-based Church of God in Christ (COGIC). He recently discovered a 45-year-old film of the late founder’s funeral. The film features many of COGIC’s pioneers. Dr. Weaver presented the film to

COGIC delegates on Friday, November 9, 2007, in the Peabody Hotel Grand Ballroom during the Holy Convocation and Centennial celebration.

Robert Yelle was on fellowship leave until this past July completing a book manuscript on the impact of the Protestant Reformation on modern language and culture. He spent a month each in Calcutta and London conducting research on the book, as well as on a new project examining the secularization of law in England and colonial India. He presented at meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the Law and Society Association, and the Madison Conference on South Asia as well as at Hofstra University and the University of Chicago An-thropology Department. He was recently appointed Executive Secretary of the North Ameri-can Association for the Study of Religion.